from her sleep until Romeo has ceased to breathe; and she dies, as in our tragedy, not in a paroxysm of grief, but by her own hand, armed with her husband's dagger."[1]
The Quartos and Folios do not divide Romeo and Juliet into acts and scenes. Mr. Daniel suggests that Act III. should end with scene iv., making Act IV. begin with the parting of the lovers. "The interposition," he writes, "of the short scene iv. alone, between the arrangement made at the Friar's Cell for the meeting of the lovers and the scene in which they part, does not give a sufficiently marked interval for the occurrence of all the events which are supposed to have passed in the interim: moreover the addition of scene v. to Act III. has the disadvantage of making that act inordinately long. Capell made the division I here suggest; but his example does not appear to have been followed by any subsequent editor." The suggestion seems to me well worthy of consideration, and I may call attention to the fact that in Q 1 the first of those ornamental dividing marks which appear on several of the later pages occurs at this point. The same ornamental division occurs in the scene of the lovers' parting at the entrance of Juliet's mother, and, I think, it was intended that there should here be a change of scene. It appears again at the close of our present Act III., at the close of IV. i., the close of IV. ii.,
- ↑ Transcripts and Studies, pp. 389–390. To the study from which I quote I may refer the reader for an account of Lope de Vega's Castelvines y Monteses and of Los Bandos de Verona, by Francisco de Rojas y Zorrilla (both of which may be read in privately printed translations by Mr. F. W. Cosens). The strange conjunction of Shakespeare's lovers with Dante's Ugolino in the Romeo et Juliette of Ducis is also noticed in the same study.
